The Fire Sermon (47 page)

I sat up, looked at him. “You could come with me. Get away from all this.”

“Why?” I wasn’t sure if he was asking why I would offer, or why he would accept. But before I could answer he shook his head again. “I can’t. It’s all gone too far. There are things I need to do.”

His hand was shaking so violently now that he dropped the proffered keys. I watched them land, settling between me and the Confessor’s body. Another shout from below, the footsteps clanging steadily closer on the steel stairs. It all felt very slow, as if Kip’s fall had broken time once and for all.

“Please.” It burst out with Zach’s exhalation, more a raw sound than a word.

I looked up at him as I took the keys. “I’m not doing this for you.”

“Faster.” He shouted loud enough for the soldiers on the stairs to hear him, but it was really me he addressed.

I stood. I knew that if I looked down, if I saw Kip’s body again, I would never be able to stop looking. So I ran, as much away from that sight, crumpled at the base of the silo, as from the soldiers’ shouts that were nearing the top of the stairs.

Once I’d locked the door behind me, it was just as Zach had said: the narrow steel passage between the silos; the red door; his chambers, occupying the top floors of the silo, the plush carpets weirdly opulent within the industrial starkness of the walls. A spiral staircase like the one next door, but this time in a bare expanse, just a concrete tube below the chambers at the top, lit by sparse electric lights. At the base, the outer door, which released me into the night. A hundred feet to my left, where the larger silo rose into the darkness, I could hear voices, even the familiar sounds of horses. But I was shielded from sight by the silo from which I’d emerged. I locked the door behind me, watching my hand turn the key with a kind of disbelief: that I could still function, still move, after what had happened. As I moved up the gorge, away from the cluster of silos, I was surprised by my own breath and my footsteps, abrasive on the gravel. That my body was still capable of making such ordinary sounds.

When I heard the riders approaching me rapidly from behind, I sped up, my body reacting even when my numbed mind could not. I was still a mile from the meeting place. And even if I could reach it, I couldn’t risk leading the pursuing soldiers to Piper and Zoe. I dived from the path, through the brambly ditch that snagged at my skin, then scrambled up again into the cover of the longer grass. But the riders leaped the ditch, too. Before I had time to look for more cover, they were upon me. Then, just like all those years ago, I was scooped up and thrown across the saddle.

“We were halfway through getting the horses when an alarm sounded at the barracks,” shouted Zoe, holding on to me tightly. “We only just beat them here, but I don’t think they saw us. Where’s Kip?”

It wasn’t the shock or relief that silenced me, but his name. I didn’t answer.

I couldn’t see Zoe, though I could feel her leaning over my back. I could just make out Piper, his dark horse drawing beside us as we slowed slightly. Zoe hauled me upright. I felt my body obey, my leg maneuver over the horse’s back.

“Did you do it?” Piper said. “The machine?”

“It’s gone,” I said. “Finished.”

“What about Kip?” I could feel Zoe’s breath on my neck as she spoke.

I met Piper’s eyes, shook my head.

He didn’t hesitate. “Go,” he said to Zoe. I closed my eyes, felt my body slump back and surrender to the momentum, the horse’s syncopated strides carrying me forward over the twice-broken world.

chapter 33

For a long time after that, I couldn’t speak. It was as if all my words had been left back there, on the floor of the silo. What happened there had shattered language. Even when Zoe shook me, or when Piper splashed water on my face and tried to coax words from me, I couldn’t form a syllable.

We rode for three days and nights, stopping only for a snatched half hour once or twice a day. The horses were ragged with tiredness, stumbling heavy-legged. Froth gathered at their lips like soap scum lathering in dirty water.

After the second day, the landscape began to change. I’d never been that far east—we were approaching the deadlands. The skin of the earth had been peeled back. There were no trees, no soil. Only flinty stone, on which the horses’ hoofs clattered and slipped, and drifts of gray ash shifting endlessly in the hot wind. The color had been stripped from the world; everything was shades of black and gray. Our own clothes and skin were the sole flashes of color, but the ash-heavy wind soon blackened these, too. Black dust clung to the edges of the horses’ eyes, and rimmed their lips and nostrils. The only water was to be found in greasy, shallow pools, their surfaces slick with ash. By the edges of these ponds lurked patches of ashen grass, so sparse that our two horses stripped them bare each time we stopped. As for food for us, Zoe and Piper didn’t even bother hunting—nothing lived out here.

We made it to the black river just in time. The horses were stumbling and we were drunk with tiredness. It took both Zoe and Piper to help me dismount. The river moved sluggishly, but its shallow valley heralded a respite in the landscape: grass, shrubs, and even one or two bony trees littered the banks.

“It’s safe to drink,” Piper assured me when we bent over the dark water. “Just shut your eyes and ignore the ash.” But by that stage I would have drunk anything. And when Zoe came back from an hour’s hunt bearing a bony lizard, we didn’t hesitate, snatching the strips of pale flesh from the fire still half-raw.

That night, as it grew dark, I found my way back into language—haltingly, at first, but then with urgency. Perhaps it was the food and drink, or the softening light of the fire. And I wanted to tell them what had happened; what Kip had done for me. I told them, too, about Zach’s plan to blame the destruction on Kip, and to pretend I’d never been in the silo. “It explains why we weren’t pursued, at least at first,” I said. “But you took two horses. Even if they believed Zach initially, they’ll know by now that Kip wasn’t alone.”

Zoe shook her head. “No—we opened up the stables and let out as many horses as we could—almost all of them. It must have slowed the soldiers down, after the alarm was raised—we were round the back of the silos before the first ones arrived. They never saw us.”

“And with half the horses missing, they won’t be able to confirm that more than one was stolen,” added Piper. “If Zach keeps to his story, there’s nothing to disprove it.”

“Weren’t there sentries, at the stable?”

Piper nodded but didn’t meet my eyes. “Only two.”

He looked relieved when I asked nothing further, but Zoe jumped in. “We didn’t leave any of our knives in the bodies, if that’s what you’re worried about. Nothing that could be linked to us.”

Piper shook his head at her, and she took the hint.

“Kip’s missing arm,” he said. “I never saw a scar. There wasn’t one, was there? Not even—up close?” He’d suddenly become oddly attentive to the fire.

“Nothing.” I remembered kissing Kip’s truncated shoulder; the firm skin; the contours of muscle and bone beneath my lips. If there was any scar, it must have been perfectly concealed; perhaps in the crease of his armpit. I couldn’t reconcile the painstaking, delicate attention required to heal a wound so immaculately, with the brutality of taking off his arm and tanking him.

“Doubtless that’s more technology they’re keeping under wraps, then. Who knows what advances they’ve made, medically, if they’re at the stage that they can keep people alive in tanks.”

Zoe spat into the fire, which hissed back at her. “Think of what they could do for Omegas—for anyone sick, or injured—if they put that sort of stuff to a better use.”

Piper nodded. “But however flawlessly they stitched it up, the Confessor still must have felt it. She’d still have felt the pain.”

“It wouldn’t have put her off,” I said. “She was tougher than you could imagine.” I hated using the past tense for the Confessor. That single word—
was
—wiped out Kip, too.

“Are there any safe houses this far east?” I asked.

Zoe laughed. “Safe houses? There’re no houses, safe or otherwise. This valley’s the last strip of life before the deadlands, Cass. There’s nothing here.”

That suited me well enough. We stayed for nearly a week, camping by the blackened river. There was enough grass for the horses, and Zoe and Piper managed to keep the three of us fed, albeit mainly on lizard flesh, gray-tinged and oily. When they weren’t hunting, they made plans. Huddled together at the water’s edge, they had long, detailed conversations about the island, about establishing a new sanctuary, rebuilding the resistance. They sketched maps in the dust, and tallied numbers: safe houses, allies, weapons, ships.

I stayed out of it. A heaviness had taken over me. I was as listless as the ash-clogged river, at which I spent whole days staring. Zoe and Piper knew better than to bother me. The two of them had a kind of self-sufficiency, the self-containment of their twinship, that let me feel alone, even in the cool nights when the three of us slept close for warmth.

I’d told them everything that happened, except for what the Confessor had told me about Kip’s behavior in the past. I could hardly shape that into thoughts, let alone words. After what Kip had done in the silo, Piper and Zoe were, at last, no longer being dismissive about him. I couldn’t bear to tell them what the Confessor had said, and to expose him once again to their judgment. More than that: if I told them, it would become real, and I would have to make my own judgment. I had already lost him in the silo. I couldn’t let the Confessor’s revelations take him from me twice over. The news of his past was a jagged reef I knew I couldn’t negotiate, not at the moment. So I skirted the Confessor’s words, not admitting them even to myself.

Instead, while Piper and Zoe talked each day, I thought about the island, and what had happened there. I remembered what Alice had said to me, just before she died: that even if the island was just an idea, maybe that was enough. I thought about the two ships that were still out west, searching the oceans for Elsewhere. I thought about the promise I’d made to Lewis, to help those who still floated in the tanks. I recalled, again and again, what Zach had said in the silo: “There are things I need to do.”

Mostly, though, I thought about what Kip had said to me, on the island and again on the boat: about my weakness being my strength. About how I viewed the world differently, in not seeing Alphas and Omegas as opposed. I thought of what my different perspective had cost him and whether anything could ever make that worthwhile. And whether I could still see the world that way, after what Zach and the Confessor had done. Kip had been the only one who had begun to understand how I felt about my twin. But his broken body on the silo floor had changed everything.

The knife wound at my neck wouldn’t heal. By the end of the week it was inflamed, and I could feel my pulse in it, each heartbeat a jab in the reddened flesh. Piper went off for an hour and returned with some murky green moss that he chewed into a paste. Kneeling in front of me, he pressed the sharp-smelling gum into the gap where the unraveled edges of my skin refused to knit.

Zoe was watching from across the fire. “Don’t bother,” she said to him. “It won’t heal until she stops fiddling with it.”

I hadn’t realized she’d noticed, but it was true. Whenever I’d thought myself unobserved, I couldn’t stop myself from tracing the wound. My fingers scrabbled at its scabbed edges, prodding the reliable pain of the exposed flesh. It was the Confessor’s last touch, and I couldn’t let it go.

Piper pulled my right hand toward him and turned it over. It was dirty—we all were—but two of my fingernails were crusted with telltale blood, from where I’d picked at the wound.

I thought he might shout at me, but he only exhaled heavily. “We can’t afford for it to get infected. Not out here, not now.”

He didn’t say it, but I knew what he meant: not after all these people have died to keep you safe. As if I didn’t think of them all the time already. Not just Kip, but the dead islanders, too. Their blood weighed on me until the blood in my own veins was heavy. I’d hardly moved since we arrived at the river.

He picked up the dampened cloth that he had been dabbing at my neck. Gently, he wiped my hands clean.

“Tell her,” said Zoe from behind him.

He nodded, without turning around, but paused before he spoke. “We’re leaving.”

I didn’t reply. These days, even my words felt heavy—the few times I spoke, I half expected my words to drop at my feet, gathering in the ash.

“If we’re going to stop Zach, we need to move now. Destroying the silo machine was a huge step. They’ll try to rebuild it, but from what the Confessor told you, she was the key to the whole thing. And she was central to so much of what they did. It was the Confessor who led them to the island. Getting rid of her has been the biggest strike you could’ve made against the Council.”

“I didn’t do that,” I said. “Kip did that.”

Piper nodded. “And it’s huge. The Council will be reeling from losing her and the machines. The fact that Zach was afraid, that he had to cover up your involvement to protect himself—that shows what a blow it is to them.”